World music review: Juana Molina, Un Dia

There used to be a regular club night called the Recycle Collective that featured different combinations of just three musicians; the ongoing theme was that each player, whether singer, saxophonist or classical violinist, played through devices that looped, multiplied and "recycled" everything they played. Un Día, the fifth album by Argentine singer-composer Juana Molina, is dominated by a similarly relentless looping technology, which she applies to her vocals to create a heaving maelstrom of catchy hooks, sighs, cries and whispers, both wordy and wordless. It's hardly new: Molina's tracks evoke the psychedelic fug of Terry Riley (Poppy Nogood, etc.), Fripp & Eno's cerebral meanderings and Björk and Jamie Lidell's more manic experiments. But Un Día's repetitions reward repeated listening; Molina's cascading, joyous vocals and clattering rhythms - on numbers such as Vive Solo, Los Hongos De Marosa and Dar (Qué Difícil) - define a quirky and decidedly non-European sound.